


weight of your world

by perennial



Category: Slow West (2015)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, and then what happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-05-06
Packaged: 2018-06-06 16:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6762118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennial/pseuds/perennial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>nothing can get you, you know i’ve got you, you’re in my arms</i>
  <br/>
  <i>nothing can get me, i know you’ve got me, i’m in your arms</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	weight of your world

**Author's Note:**

> [[roo panes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utUog1thq38)]
> 
> the dream sequence in the cabin fascinates me. we cut to it from jay, and exit to silas. who was the dreamer? i think it’s meant to be both – jay’s worst nightmare, silas’s secret highest hope. i consider it an extension of the ending, like the inverse of a credits scene. this is what happens between the shootout and the realized dream.

The first thing she asks him is _Are you dying?_

When he tells her he isn’t, she stands and goes to the chest at the end of the bed and pulls out a stack of linens. She tosses a folded sheet to him; then, after a moment, a second one.

 _For your leg,_ she says, _and for him._

Then she goes outside, arms full of cloth, to hide the bodies from the sun.

-

_Are there more coming?_

He doesn’t know whether she means more bounty hunters or more of the gang, but either way he says, _No._

She still looks over her shoulder for months.

-

He asks, _Don’t you have to sit up with the bodies?_

_What for?_

_I wouldn’t know, I’m not a Catholic._

_Neither am I. I’m Presbyterian._

He ends up waiting out the night with the dead after all. Don’t put them in the house, he instructs her, not even her father’s or Jay’s—the smell will stay. Even in twenty years, it will return unbidden to linger in her nostrils. They lay the bodies on the grass, white blocks of cotton against the gold, and he sits sentry with a rifle propped against his elevated knee to keep the coyotes away.

He can hear her crying through the thin, shot-up walls of the house.

-

He cannot dig with pain lancing through the length of his arm and leg every time he puts the slightest pressure on them. She says _I’ll do it_ and takes the shovel.

He tells her: _The Blackfoot don’t bury their dead._

She looks troubled before saying, _He adopted our ways._

It takes her twice as long as it would have taken him, and for all she is a farm girl, her hands are covered in blisters by the time she is finished. Three graves, one too close to the other so half the wall of dirt between them has come crumbling down, marked by three crude crosses he fashioned while she labored.

She shows him her palms. _I can’t do this again,_ she says, exhausted and fighting tears.

He tells her, _I’ll finish it._

-

_…earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust._

She grips her father’s Book of Common Worship so hard her nails dig into the leather. Then she sits and watches as he slowly fills each hole, her father’s the last.

He drops onto the ground beside her, him on her right and she to his left, both of them facing the graves. They sit in silence for a while, until her tears dry and his arm stops throbbing and the only sounds are the wind moving through the trees and the birds chirping high above them.

 _Did you love him?_ He senses this is the only time he will ever be able to ask it, and he wants to know the answer.

 _No._ She sounds tired. _But a little more time and it wouldn’t have been hard to convince me that marrying him was a good idea._

The implications are in her tone, not her words. She had liked him, he had loved her; he would have been a good husband to her; she always wanted to marry for love but that’s a chance in a million, isn’t it? Who has such a luxury?

It won’t be until much later that he realizes he doesn’t know if she was speaking of the kid or the native.

-

They don’t bury the others.

He says, _They weren’t all bad. They had their good points._ It is meant to take some of the sting from the loss of those now within the not too distant dirt. It is the only eulogy the gang will receive.

They load the bodies into a wagon to haul them into the forest and burn them, and that is where they find the orphans.

-

She pins cloths over the shattered windows. She scrubs the blood out of the wood floor until it resembles nothing but a dark brown patch which might be pretended into a coffee stain. She salvages everything she can, carefully scooping up uncontaminated salt; she hands anything that might be repaired to the invalid to work on while he is immobile. The children make a game of plugging the bullet holes in the walls – first with rags, and then with all manner of flotsam and jetsam: acorns, mud, cicadas.

He sits in the sun with the broken crockery and watches her trying to repair the fences, because nature does not stop for grief. The boy regards him from across the porch, his critical eyes taking in the two completed teacups, the sun shining through gaps that will have to be filled with glue later.

He holds up a plate that will never sit flat again. _I think I’m getting the hang of it now._

He would like to be the one to fix her mother’s music box, but while he has many skills, that does not number among them. He fiddles with it for three weeks before admitting defeat. They submit it to a passing tinker who fixes it in less than an hour and is generously paid for his services—overpaid, frankly—with a kiss on the cheek from her.

He’s going to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. It’s not so bad. He’s alive to limp, for one thing. He’s still got the leg, for another. It will slow him down, and that’s not good news in a world where survival often depends on speed, but he’s not going anywhere for a while, anyhow.

-

The children adjust as though they have never had another life, when this is, at minimum, their fourth.

They play, and laugh, and chase each other, and acquire the odd assortment of cuts and scratches that accompany childhood. They trust their new caretakers with worrisome ease, followed them back to the cabin without question. Perhaps that is what comes of living four lives in such a meagre set of years.

They don’t speak a lick of English. It makes for an interesting first week.

She tries to teach them the language, and he tries when he remembers to, with mixed results.

_What is that you’re saying? Even I can’t understand you._

_Oh and excuse me for not running all my words together like some pirate._

_Pirate, is it! At least I’m not adding an extra three Rs to the word green!_

The children don’t understand their bickering or their banter, but they watch, two pairs of gray eyes fixed on the performance, giggling at the faces he pulls for their benefit. Soon enough she is laughing, too, so hard she clutches her ribs.

And in the end if she’s calling water _vatten_ and he’s answering to _far_ and the dog only obeys orders given in Swedish, well, variety is the spice of life, isn’t it?

-

He isn’t used to sitting still. He can’t say if it rankles out of habit or true restlessness.

She says _Stop that. You’re going to make it worse._

_It itches._

Her eyes light up. _That’s good!_

He looks at his leg dubiously.

 _It means you’re mending. It’s not going to get infected._ She sounds so relieved that he feels guilty: he had not known she was so worried. He ought to have put some more effort into healing, somehow.

-

Her father snored like thunder lived at the back of his throat. The first few nights in the little house without him are so silent they set her ears ringing.

Then, slowly, she learns the new sounds hiding within the quiet. There are night noises she has never had an opportunity to register, revealing a whole new face of this new world. She listens to the coyotes howling high up the slope, calling for something they cannot have. She learns that birds start singing well before dawn.

She listens to three sets of quiet breathing. The sighing and stirring of the children, the way their hands hit the wooden floor when they turn over in their sleep. He coughs in his sleep sometimes, more often after he’s had a cigar following supper. She learns the way he breathes when he’s awake, when he’s sleeping, when he wants her to think he’s sleeping. Until she realizes, lying there in the silence, that she can pick out the source of every single sound.

-

The valley is quiet. They have no neighbors to speak of. The nearest trading post is two hours’ ride away. The Rosses came here to hide, after all.

He has established himself as a drifter, a loner, but the isolation of the valley throws into relief how rare his solitude has really been. When what can be repaired is done with, there is little to fill the time. He carves toys for the children, crude things out of wood they bring him, and he hides the knife nicks on his fingers from her. He finds himself reading newspapers for more than the rewards listings. He learns all about all the doings in the big cities, what the politicians in Washington are fighting over, the new inventions it makes no sense to live without, all the pickings and discards of society.

He thinks it fine to stay right where they are.

-

Once the orphans finally start talking they don’t shut up. No matter than he can’t understand one word in ten. They narrate their lives, even though he’s standing right there watching the whole thing. And then they start asking questions, like he’s some all-knowing wise man on a mountaintop. It’s worse than Jay.

And that’s another thing. He always thought kids were kids. Nothing complicated there – they’re hardly thinking creatures, children. Was he ever wrong. Kids are the most selfish beings that exist. Always wanting to play checkers because they don’t know how to take a hint that a man has other priorities at present. Requesting silly songs at bedtime and any other hour of the day that strikes their fancy, because kids don’t give a damn how world-weary and jaded one is, and they sure as hell can’t recognize an inopportune moment.

And when they curl up under the crook of his arm and fall asleep, well. Who could have guessed one short skinny body could be so heavy, or generate so much heat.

All in all, it isn’t the worst gig he’s ever had.

-

She doesn’t invite him to stay, but she doesn’t ask him to go, either; and he doesn’t ask to stay, but he doesn’t make plans to go, either. They never talk about it, and after a while anything there is to talk about fades away like dew in the sun. He comes in one afternoon and says, _In the spring we ought to push that field out another twenty rows,_ and she says _I had the same thought,_ and that’s that.

-

One day he takes off in the direction of the trading post and stays gone until suppertime, just long enough for her to know a spasm of relief when the familiar silhouette of his horse appears in the distance.

He has brought back a half-grown dog: a big dark german shepherd with a growl and a bite to be reckoned with, that nuzzles the hands of the children and shows its teeth to strangers. She sleeps through the night for the first time in weeks.

-

They plow up the burnt part of the field. A third of the crop was lost, which isn’t everything thank God but it wasn’t a big field to begin with. Then they reseed it, because while it may be too late in the season to grow anything viable, she can’t stand look at the bare, broken earth until spring.

They stand together, catching their breath, surveying their work.

There is a mayfly caught in the hair above her eyes and he reaches over to brush it away. His hand hangs there for a heartbeat, then drops.

Every time she looks at him for the rest of the day, she remembers it.

-

She finds the wanted poster, tucked away in the lining of his boots when she’s cleaning them. When has she ever cleaned his boots?

She shakes him awake, eyes dark and furious, disorienting him so much that his impulse is to reach for his gun.

He sleeps in her old bed; she sleeps in the one vacated by her father. He was against it for a long time—he wanted the children to share one, with him on a pallet on the floor. But she had insisted. They won’t know the difference until they’re older, she had said. The floor won’t hurt them, they’re softer, their bones aren’t hardened yet. He guesses she would know best; childhood is a far piece behind him. Anyway, he won’t say that after a long day of farm labor he isn’t glad to throw himself down on something that has some give to it.

And the scent of her on the sheets. He won’t say that doesn’t keep him awake some nights.

But he can hear her crying at night, long into the months following the massacre, and on those nights he regrets ever letting her switch, would give almost anything to be the one inhaling those memories instead, with her dreaming peacefully in her rose-smell across the room.

_What’s this, then?_

The paper is so creased it would fall apart into eight soft-edged squares with one hearty gust of wind.

 _Saving that for a rainy day, were you?_ she spits.

He won’t be surprised if she tries to kill him. If their positions were reversed, he would have put a bullet in her head while she was still sleeping. It’s these things about her that he can’t help wanting to preserve. No matter how fast she gets with a gun, no matter the lives she has taken and how much blood she has seen, there is an innocence there that she isn’t even aware of. Naïveté, maybe. Liability, certainly. And yet he can’t bring himself to teach her otherwise.

He smiles slightly, and touches the paper with one finger, doesn’t try to take it from her. _I like to have you with me wherever I go._

There is a ring of truth in a statement that would have seemed like a jest if he were any more awake. She looks startled. The fire in her eyes cools into confusion. He yawns wide and slowly moves to swing his legs out of bed. It isn’t dawn for a bit yet, but there’s no hope of getting back to sleep now. What got into her, to clean his boots, and so early in the morning? He pulls on his trousers, stumbles over to the larder to find the salt pork and start brewing coffee. She watches him narrowly, unsettled, disarmed.

_It’s not even a good likeness._

_It’s in the eyes._

-

She grieves for Jay and Kotori and even the little ones’ parents. She misses her father in a way that she has not found words for. She watches the wheat grow tall and then darken, and cannot believe that so much time has already passed.

Sometimes when the wind changes she stands in the waving grass and she is almost back in Scotland. For a moment the truth subsides with a sigh of relief and she is again the girl she was: light of heart, sure of her surroundings. She wonders about the girl she might have been, but for a fall in the dark.

A single accident. That was all it took to put the wheels in motion, until everything was in upheaval or destroyed. How many mistakes has she made that put other wheels in motion, ones she cannot even imagine?

She feels torn at the edges—incomplete and vulnerable.

And then she turns her head and sees two bright heads shining in the sun, a battered hat bent over a fencepost, a calico dress billowing like a bell in the breeze, a scrap of rag tied to a swaying stick that rises from within the wheat, a blue shirt pinned to the clothesline, a thin line of cigar smoke rising into the dusk, two sets of sleep-flushed cheeks sunken into their pillows, the mountains high and green in the distance, the clouds wreathed around them in a brilliant blue sky.

She has lost much, but, _oh_ \- what she has gained.

-

Both children fall ill, rapidly and without warning. They return uncharacteristically early one afternoon from playing at the treeline, flushed and fevered, and when he drops the plow and runs for her, waving both arms over his head, she stands paralyzed, as though watching an approaching tornado.

It is bad, and it only gets worse.

She never says it: we can’t lose them. But it’s there, as loud as a shout in their minds, an almost tangible thing in the room. We can’t lose them. Not after everything else. Not after everyone else.

 _I don’t know what this is,_ she does say, and her fear radiates from her eyes. _I don’t know how to treat this, and we don’t have any medicine—_

They cobble together their knowledge. He knows some healing plants; she knows old farmwives’ cures for sicknesses that are not this one. They make do because they must.

The fever sweeps through the small bodies like fire, and they spend every minute beating it back. There is little sleep to be had. Soon enough the adults are as pale and haggard as their patients. They trade off making poultices, heating water, cooling foreheads, singing quiet songs, ordering each other to rest or they’ll be good for nothing to anyone, making threats they have no intention of fulfilling.

_I won’t take care of you if you catch it too._

_Wouldn’t have let you._

They don masks, however, and they take covert glances at each other, assessing whether the other shows any signs of illness. Their unacknowledged fears sit at the edge of their minds.

To be left alone in the face of this storm, with three to care for instead of one-and-some.

To be left alone, perhaps, the only one left in this place that has become a haven for them all.

To be thrown back into the loneliness from which they have been granted such short reprieve.

To lose—

She wakes him with a touch when the girl’s fever breaks and he does the same for her when the boy’s does. They are too tired to do much more than smile and run their fingers through the sweaty hair above each cooling forehead. They fall asleep kneeling beside the bed, their heads pillowed on their arms next to the small, breathing bodies, their linked hands resting on the floor between them.

-

It is a long time before he forgives himself for failing Jay. He was the kid’s chaperone, for pity’s sake. He’d known better and he’d let it go too far. He’d thought he had it under control. Look where that had gotten them.

He’s admitted to himself by now that consideration for Jay’s life had nothing to do with what took him all the way to the cabin door to warn the inhabitants away.

You can’t relive a life. He doesn’t know what he would do differently, if he had the choice. He has to make his peace with his mistakes. He has to make his peace with the knowledge that he played a part in the stifling of a bright young life.

Easier said than done.

-

Dusk falls over the fields. They sit on the porch because indoors is still as hot as a closed box. The children chase fireflies, bringing them back winking in their cupped hands to have the glowing ends pinched off and stuck to their fingers like bioluminescent jewels.

When it gets dark they put lanterns in the windows. Insects buzz around the light, hitting against the oilpaper lining the casements. He picks up both of her hands with his and leads her into a waltz. She grins, sliding easily into the steps, and they both hum the music together, his chest vibrating against hers, her breath warm against his shirt. The scruff of his chin occasionally scratches her temple. The children spin around them in imitation, adding their own tuneless notes to the night.

She starts a new song, a reel her father used to play. He knows the tune, and the children pick up the repetitive parts and sing them at their own pace, and soon the air around the porch is filled with a cacophony of senseless, happy noise. They speed up until they aren’t even dancing to real steps, just whirling around and around, panting with laughter and broken song, as the moon rises huge and gold above them.

-

The dog kills a fox, but not before it kills two of the chickens. She burns her hand on the stove, the milk tastes of onions, an oilpaper is torn right off the window by a driving storm that soaks his bed and half the house, and the boy needs a tooth pulled. They don’t realize the storm drowned a corner of the field until it is rotted, the girl gets a terrible sunburn on her face and neck, and three of the precious plates are dropped and shatter beyond repair.

They reach the end of the week with relief.

 _Well,_ he says, _I think that about does it for this month. Should be clear sailing from here out._

 _Rap wood,_ she retorts, and does so. The children are enthusiastic, and go around knocking on the floorboards and walls, and that is how they learn they have a rat’s nest under the house.

-

Her skin was made for this sun. It turns toasted and rosy, and her smile gleams whiter and her eyes glow green. They are a universe away from the pallor of Scotland. This is the sort of sun that sets life racing beneath the skin. It makes her want to open her arms to the world and embrace it.

The harvest is hot work. They are all undressed as far as they can and still be decent. His suspenders hang by his knees, his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, sleeves rolled up above his biceps. She wears her breeches with her chemise tied at her waist. The children run around chasing away birds in hardly anything but the skin they were born in.

He takes a break for water; her eyes follow him. There is something about the lines of his body, the way he moves, the way he tilts his head, that makes it hard to look away. She can see the blue of his eyes from twenty rows’ distance.

The little girl runs up to him and asks for something. He smiles in agreement. He hoists her under her arms—and then he has her flying, shrieking with laughter as he swings her up, up, up in the air as high as he can, her feet touching the sky.

-

Mornings are quiet. They fall into a pattern fairly early on: whoever rises first will touch the shoulder of the one still sleeping. The first one up dresses in the pantry. Faces are washed in a basin by the back porch, and the last one to use it always replaces the water for whoever follows; that’s never been a spoken rule, or anything they speak of at all—they do it out of affection. He makes the coffee while she visits the chickens. She slices the bread and he fries the eggs. The children wake with tousled heads and climb into their chairs, subdued until they are fed.

He watches her ruffle the boy’s hair as she passes the table. _God morgen, sleepyhead._

They chime their replies back, showing her slow smiles. She sits in the same chair that she always does and puts a spoonful of apple jam on both their plates. _Now, who did I hear snoring last night? I thought there was a bear in the house! Was it you, Eva lass? Oh, it must have been Jan, then. Jan, why didn’t you tell me you’re half-bear? All this time!_ They dissolve into bread-stifled giggles.

It’s a shock, realizing how fast he’s gotten used to this.

-

She plaits the girl's hair into two yellow ropes and ties them off with a bit of rag. Together they weave tiny white flowers into the gaps. The girl’s lap is full of them, just picked as they walked through the grass to the treeline.

_There now. The sith themselves wouldn't know you weren't one of them._

The girl looks uncertain. _Shee?_

 _You know. The folk_ —she gestures meaninglessly— _who live under the earth and come out to dance at midsummer._

The girl looks skeptical.

_Ach, well. I see we have some stories still to tell. Now. Shall we make a warrior of you?_

She explains all the parts of Jay’s gun before handing it over: how the bullets are loaded, how the safety works, what to expect to feel when it fires. She shows her how to look at her target, how to factor in the wind. They shoot at knotholes until suppertime, and wander back home with wilted flowers dangling from their hair and their hands warm in each other’s.

-

 _Stop that,_ she snaps. There is an undercurrent of fear in her tone. She steps away.

_Stop what?_

_Looking at me like that._

_I’m just looking at you._

_Well, stop._

_Stop looking at you altogether?_

_If it’s the only way you’re able to, yes._

_Rose!_ he protests, half laughing.

How can she say it?

_Everyone who has ever loved me is dead._

_I can’t risk you._

But he hears it anyway.

 _Alright,_ he says, and steps back.

She marches away from him, through the golden grass back to the golden house. By the time she reaches it, her fingers are shaking so much she can hardly open the door.

-

She stares at the wood grain of the tabletop.

 _It’s too late besides,_ he tells her. _The kid hardly ever stopped talking about you. I never stood a chance. I was half in love with you before I even got here._

She cannot meet his eyes. She sits, silent.

( _To lose—_ )

The smile slides off his face.

 _No matter,_ he says lightly.

He remembers something he left unfinished—outside. She looks up in time to see him stride out the door, his jaw clenched.

-

He is polite.

He smiles and talks to her just as easily as he ever did. But something has gone. He looks away a little too quickly. He avoids touching her, pulling away from even an accidental brush. The happiness that warmed his words is only present with the children. She doesn’t know whether it hurts more that none of it is by conscious choice.

He sits across the table and she misses him so badly it feels like her chest is caving in.

-

He is dressed and out the door before she is even out of bed.

 _Silas,_ she says, but he doesn’t hear.

-

He lowers the scythe to wipe his forehead and sees her coming toward him. She sees him see her, and she smiles and holds a jug of water high above her head.

 _I have some,_ he tells her, when she is close enough.

_Warm by now. This is cooler._

He drinks it thankfully. The warm jug is demoted to utility water, and he uses it to wash the sweat off his face and neck. It’s bliss to clear the salt out of his eyes. He straightens and squints down at her. She is beaming up at him, pleased by his pleasure.

She looks so happy that he can’t help responding. His wide toothy grin fills his face. They are once again the co-conspirators of old, a bit of mischief in their smiles, their friendship never in doubt.

He looks at her with pure affection, as though there is no sight that lifts his heart like her uncovered head burnished by the sun. She stands there, unmoving, the wind whipping at her hair and apron. She simply looks.

His breath shortens. Some of his smile slips away to make room for raw hope. He searches her eyes.

_Why’d you bring me water?_

_I wanted to be near you,_ she says simply.

He lets out a breath like a man who has been holding it for months.

She smiles, biting her bottom lip, and reaches up to take his face in her hands. Standing on the tips of her toes, she presses her lips gently to his.

The warmth of him wraps around her, and his mouth moves against hers, and she sags against him in a combination of happiness and relief and sudden trembling. And then he is kissing her breathless—and the world turns weightless—and when they finally break apart she is dizzy and euphoric.

This is what it must feel like to be drunk, she thinks. She leans her forehead against his collarbone. She never knew that was what a kiss does.

He laughs. _Sweetheart, you have no idea,_ he says, and bends his face to hers again.

-

They say the words in her father’s Book of Common Worship, with two wild-haired Swedish children and a german shepherd and the cloudless sky for witnesses.

-

Winter is bitterly cold. She has never known such weather as this, coming as she does from the coastal cliffs. The snow never seems to stop.

It seems as good a reason as any to stay inside and under the quilts, making each other’s blood run hot, legs twined together and arms keeping each other close.

-

She twists her hair up in a knot and puts on a sunhat. He swings the boy up onto his shoulders. The girl and the dog run ahead of them.

They walk around the fields, surveying the mud, enjoying the meager warmth on their faces. He shields his eyes with his hand; the boy wears his hat. Her nose fills with the smells of freshly turned earth and green growing things.

Halfway through, the boy scrambles down (not without a kick to the jaw), and brother and sister run off to play leapfrog amongst the tree stumps that will be torn up before the plowing starts.

 _Too much water sitting here._ He points.

Her hand slips into his. They walk without hurrying, waving to the children in the distance, holding up the plans they spent the cold months making against the realities, just as they will again and again for the months to come. It is anyone’s guess what will actually come to fruition by harvest’s end, but now they focus on the seeds and the sowing, and live each day one at a time.

-

She does not think life can get any sweeter, and then it does.

He spends six months building cradles, some of which might be called successes. She spends them cleaning the cabin from top to bottom repeatedly, and trying to convince him they need a bigger house whenever he persuades her to sit down. They are bursting at the seams as it is, and the tiny annex they put up for the children isn’t going to hold them long.

There is no question of the name. They would have called it Jay even if it had been a girl, poor thing.

She suspects he loves the baby more than he loves her—which is exactly right. She loves it more than she loves him, and she loves him more than she ever dreamed a heart was capable of loving.

-

He stands in the doorway, watching the rain slash through the wheat and set it roiling. _Like the North Sea during a storm,_ she tells him.

The last time he saw sheets of rain like this was when the river flooded with him in it. Him and Jay. He lets the memory stay, skimming over it affectionately, though in the moment there was nothing about it he would have wanted to remember.

He wishes there was a way to thank him. For this. For all of it.

He wonders how things would have turned out if the kid had lived. Or maybe he already knows. These things have a way of working themselves out, after all.

-

The stranger says, _Y’all lived here long?_

He glances back at the children, who are running in and out of the waving white sheets. She has paused in her work, shading her eyes to watch him.

_Since they were born._

The stranger relaxes, smiles wider. _So you know these parts. You seen a Scotsman passing through? Year ago or thereabouts. Name of Ross. Old friend of the family, you see._

He scratches the back of his head. _Might have been. We see a lot of folk._

_Big man. With a pretty daughter. Either would stand out._

_I reckon they would._

He isn’t the first and he won’t be the last, and she will be tense all night, listening, but they know how to pick out the differences between the seekers and the hunters. This one looks hungry, like he needs the money for somebody waiting back home, not like the slanted, sly looks that indicate a love for killing and getting rewarded for it.

 _Nah,_ he says. Survival is knowing when to strike. _Nobody round here fitting that description._

The man touches his forehead and moves on.

-

They learn to live without butter.


End file.
